Research progress in speech translation

A four-year project on speech translation technology, which was jointly completed by the CAS Institute of Automation (CAS-IA), the CAS Research Center of Computer & Language Information Engineering, and the CAS Institute of Acoustics, is well received by an evaluation panel under the auspices of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

Speech translation technology, an interdisciplinary subject involving such fields as computer science, machine translation, computational linguistics, phonetics, and communications is considered as one of the most challenging areas in information technology.

With financial support from NSFC between January 1999 and December 2002, a research team headed by Professor Huang Taiyi of the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition under the CAS Institute of Automation was working on the new approaches to spoken language translation. So far they have made much progress in solving a number of key issues, including robust speech recognition, spoken language parsing, collection and annotation of large corpus of spoken language, multi-approach speech translation and multi-modal speech synthesis. These techniques will lay a solid foundation for the researchers to further their studies on speech to speech communication translation oriented to multi-language and multi-domain at any time in any place. The scientists also achieved important innovation progress in translation theory of spoken languages and system integration. Their research has led to the establishment of a first-class very-large multilingual spoken language corpus and several experimental speech translation systems and platforms for multi-lingual translation.

The research team has joined numbers of important international research activities, and CAS-IA has been accepted as a partner of Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR), an international effort to facilitate global cooperation in speech-to-speech translation research. In March 2002, the Chinese-Korean bi-directional mobile phone based speech translation system was successfully demonstrated, which was developed by CAS-IA in cooperation with ETRI (Electronic Telecommunication Research Institute, Korea), another partner of C-STAR.

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